About the event

Secret Santa is a popular way of giving presents at Christmas, but it often results in unthoughtful and ultimately unwanted gifts. Instead, this year children’s charity Action for Children are giving people the option to give a gift with meaning, by visiting their Secret Santa Pop-Up Store and purchasing a gift in a unique manner, to make a vulnerable child’s Christmas a little brighter.

Action for Children has worked with Capgemini, a consulting, technology services and digital transformation company, to create an exciting, immersive gifting experience - Elf.ai. Designed and created by Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange, Elf.ai uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you find the perfect gift you might want to donate to a vulnerable child this year. To make this possible, elves present you a collection of festive photos and see how you react to them. The elves then work in the background, feeding your emotional responses into the Elf.ai prediction engine, which then suggests a gift it thinks you’d most like to donate; gifts range from a pair of warm winter shoes to a trip to a pantomime show. At the end of the experience, shoppers are transformed into a Secret Santa with a takeaway Instagram filter which they can use to spread the joy of Christmas.